HIV Still Smarter Than Scientists

An HIV vaccine that helps you get HIV was not the idea behind the STEP Study, but that's what scientists are saying they got. 100 volunteers in the program were from Seattle, and the now-halted trial was co-sponsored by the Vaccine Trials Network, which works out of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

The Seattle Times and the P-I are both reporting on the story, which if nothing else illustrates a case of Donald Rumsfeld's "unknown unknowns" in action. The Times says:

The vaccine used a disabled form of a common-cold virus to carry three synthetically produced HIV genes into the body. It was hoped that those genes would spur the body to unleash an HIV-targeted immune response using so-called "killer" T cells. Neither the cold virus nor the HIV genes could reproduce, so volunteers could not catch a cold or become infected with HIV directly from the vaccine.

The immune system was just supposed to have a better chance to spot the otherwise very sneaky HIV as it responded to the known enemy, adenovirus, type 5. Yet volunteers who had been exposed to that variant of the cold virus were determined to be more vulnerable to HIV infection.

Of all the possible outcomes of the trial, this one caught everyone off-guard, reports the P-I: "I don't think there are very many precedents for this sort of thing," said Dr. Keith Gottesdiener, vice president for clinical research at Merck. "We don't understand what this means," said Dr. Margaret Johnston, an AIDS expert at the NIH. "This was a question we were not prepared to address in this study," said Dr. Julie McElrath, an AIDS vaccine researcher.

This kind of experimental "failure" is likely to turn out to be very informative (even corrective), so we're not that disappointed to hear that new shit has come to light. We're just doubtful that the moments of humility quoted above will stick, and for the sake of science, we wish it would.